It is best to label your child before the holiday
Long-distance travel broadens the horizons of the youngest and is fun for parents and children? Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that! Such tours often run chaotically and differently than planned. However, if you prepare for critical situations, you can avoid many a problem.
The little one has fun in the sea off Thailand’s coast – whether he also wants to visit temples is another question
Quelle: Getty Images/From Hurricane1984
Dhe travel visions of young parents are sometimes downright touching: discovering the world together with their offspring, raising the children to be open-minded cosmopolitans, teaching them multicultural ideals at an early age… In their mind’s eye they see their children eating with chopsticks, without using the Eating Thai curry and, with a bit of luck, picking up the first words of an exotic idiom. One almost wants to accompany these performances with shallow violin music.
However, the reality is often a little bit different: Build a sandcastle on the beach at 5 a.m. in the morning because jet lag is hitting you, go to bed no later than 7 p.m. eat lunch every day at the same chip shop because the child is not at all cosmopolitan and rejects all foreign dishes, regularly return to the hotel for naps and fear a tropical virus with every sneeze. It can also look like this.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m an absolute fan of long-distance travel with children. Sometimes they turn out differently than planned. And that’s the friendly formulation. You only know how a small child reacts to a strange environment when the time has come. For example, after landing in Japan, when the youngsters turn their jet lag into a rather uncomfortable daily rhythm that begins before dawn and does full justice to the ambiguity of the term. Anyone who has ever tried to think of exciting activities in a hotel before sunrise knows what is meant.
You have to be brave when flying with a small child
It’s quite possible that you know a lot of parents who regularly hang out with their offspring abroad, who don’t have any problems, go through with their usual travel program and of course tell everyone about it – after all, this is solely due to the good upbringing and easy-going attitude of the parents!
Everyone else, of course, tends to keep their mouths shut. Because it sounds a lot less cool to admit that the recovery factor went close to zero along the way. There’s also the nagging question, “Are we perhaps to blame for the fact that it didn’t work out so well?” Did we get too uptight about it?” And of course – the bonus track! – because otherwise the chorus of “I told you right away, that can’t be done” warnings will quickly rise.
It’s like this: Traveling with children, not just going to an all-inclusive resort or a holiday apartment on the North Sea, really traveling, that’s downright reprehensible. Hardly any other topic is as polarizing as the question: When can you drive and how far with your children? Is that torture for the little ones or the cornerstone of a cosmopolitan upbringing? And do they have anything to do with it at all?
On the plane, electronic entertainment keeps little ones entertained
What: Getty Images/Westend61
If you get on a plane with a small child, you have to be brave, because it is very likely that a collective groan will accompany the walk through the narrow rows of chairs. And not without reason. There are parents who entertain their young son with a toy drum during a 12-hour flight. The only reason this family – a true-life story – didn’t have to disembark en route over the Pacific is because you can’t open the doors during the flight.
Playing Nintendo action games at full volume also has a similar effect, albeit often not on the parents, who have probably been deaf for a long time or who don’t know how to read the evil looks of fellow passengers. So that such situations do not arise in the first place, it is important to prepare. It’s good that children can be bought!
Tips for parents traveling with children:
- Parents who are economical with TV time at home and do not own computer games have an advantage: on the plane, the offspring are glued to the small screen and enthusiastically click through the in-flight entertainment program. Of course, the rating “pedagogically valuable” has to be generously dispensed with in these hours.
- Bring well stocked toys. Lego, for example, although you have to bravely accept a certain loss.
- Small candies. There is no point in unpacking a large bag of jelly beans at the very beginning of the journey. It’s better to split up the “attractions” and add them every two hours.
- paper and crayons. Firstly, you can wipe them off again when they land on the seats, and secondly, the child doesn’t gouge their eyes out with it at the first air leak.
- For night flights, it’s worth asking about empty seats at check-in. If the flight is not fully booked, you should book the two aisle seats in the middle block and use the empty seats in between – usually no other guest will be seated there as long as there are alternatives. But beware! In the first row, the armrests usually cannot be folded up, so the empty seats are of little use.
- take a buggy with you! Not only is it ideal for an afternoon nap, it also guarantees that the strapped-in child will not disappear into the vastness of the night market after five minutes.
- Label children: Children get lost quickly in airports and train stations. In the event of an emergency, it is advisable to write the mobile phone number, including the international area code, on the child’s arm with a ballpoint pen. If the worst comes to the worst, the finder can contact us immediately by telephone.
The text is a chapter from the recently published book “What you thought you never wanted to know about traveling” by Françoise Hauser, Conbook Verlag, 256 pages, 9.95 euros.
Source: Conbook Verlag
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